{"id":1873942,"date":"2026-04-08T15:15:49","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T12:15:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1873942"},"modified":"2026-04-08T15:15:49","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T12:15:49","slug":"us-latinx-art-forum-plots-its-future-with-new-leader-josh-t-franco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1873942","title":{"rendered":"US Latinx Art Forum Plots Its Future with New Leader Josh T. Franco"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tA decade ago, Latinx art within the US didn\u2019t have as much visibility as it has now. One of the key organizations advocating for this increased prominence in mainstream institutions is the U.S. Latinx Art Forum (USLAF), founded in 2015 by a group of scholars who wanted to ensure that Latinx artists would not gain not just recognition but canonization too.<\/p>\n

\n\tNow, USLAF is charting its next steps. At the end of last year, the organization appointed artist, archivist, and curator Josh T. Franco as its next executive director. Franco succeeds founding director, art historian and Tufts University professor Adriana Zavala.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn his role as director, Franco thinks it\u2019s important to take USLAF in a slightly new direction, and he\u2019s already made an important change to the organization, tweaking its mission statement with Mary Thomas, who was promoted to deputy director at the same time as his hiring.<\/p>\n

\n\tInstead of solely aiming to \u201cadvance the vitality of Latinx art through an intergenerational network,\u201d Franco and Thomas are now working on \u201ccreat[ing] an expansive and convivial space that fosters relationships\u201d by simply \u201changing out in this space,\u201d as their mission statement says. This will lead to \u201cnew exhibitions, scholarship, programs and collaborations that advance the field into a dynamic future.\u201d To start, it has begun organizing intimate dinners in cities like New York, San Juan, Chicago, and San Antonio, to connect artists with other USLAF members and potential supporters.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe new mission statement emphasizes and makes central the idea of hanging out,\u201d Franco said. \u201cThe idea is that if USLAF creates spaces\u2014tending to space and place and groupings of people carefully\u2014things will happen organically. It\u2019s grown out of what we\u2019ve seen ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

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A USLAF-organized walkthrough of \u201cFelix Gonzalez-Torres: Always To Return\u201d (2024\u201325), which Franco cocurated. <\/span>Courtesy USLAF<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

A Decade of Growth<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tUSLAF formed in 2015 shortly after a panel at the annual conference of the College Art Association titled \u201cImagining a U.S. Latina\/o Art History.\u201d It was a lively conversation, Franco told ARTnews<\/em> in a recent interview, adding, \u201cWe were responding to what we heard, primarily about not being visible to one another and not having representation in museums\u2019 permanent collections and exhibitions.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the 11 years since its founding, USLAF has published research papers with data it gathered that shows this lack of representation; created a directory for its growing membership, now numbering around 600 individuals; and launched different programs to bring the community together.<\/p>\n

\n\tIts most visible work, however, might be the Latinx Artist Fellowship program, which ran from 2021 to 2025 and awarded 75 emerging, mid-career, and established artists $50,000 each. The funds came from a $5 million grant from the Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, which also earmarked money for the publication of scholarly essays on each artist and the appointment of a full-time staff member: Thomas, the current deputy director.<\/p>\n

\n\tFranco said that the fellowship\u2019s impact has been twofold. Not only has it given visibility to the winning artists, but it has also raised the profile of the field in general through the accompanying writing initiative, \u201cX as Intersection: Writing on Latinx Art.\u201d The essays, organized into 10 different themes like \u201cUnmasking Coloniality\u201d and \u201cMateriality of Memory,\u201d are commissioned via an open call.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cEvery year, we see more and more names we don\u2019t recognize,\u201d Franco said. \u201cTen years ago, we would have recognized everybody who submitted. Now about 90 percent of the names are new to us, so I\u2019d like to think we had a big part in creating that interest.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOnce \u201cX as Intersection\u201d publishes its final collection, USLAF will turn its attention to organizing an ambitious exhibition, featuring the work of all 75 fellows at Tufts University. The organization is also hoping to secure additional venues so that it can tour the country and even internationally.<\/p>\n

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USLAF\u2019s \u201cX as Intersection: Writing on Latinx Art\u201d presents writing on its 75 artist fellows, organized into different themes, like \u201cColonial Racial Capitalism.\u201d <\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Plotting the Next Decade<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tFranco said he is also working to ensure USLAF\u2019s financial stability, which is often a challenge for most nonprofits, especially small ones like USLAF, which has had an annual operating budget of $250,000 (on average during the past five years). To do this, Franco will form USLAF\u2019s first board of directors who will be tasked, in part, with shoring up its reserve funds. In the past, USLAF has had an advisory board whose main focus has been on helping shape its strategic vision.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut under Franco, USLAF is also asking for donations in a somewhat untraditional way.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019ve talked with and worked with a lot of executives at big arts funders over the last 10 years in other capacities, and I know that they, like me, are tired of the idea of deliverables,\u201d Franco said, \u201cwhere you say, here are the bullet points of the things that will happen in three years if you give us X amount of money. It\u2019s stifling\u2014and then it just sets everybody up for disappointment. Great things will happen anyway, but there\u2019s this delusion that if it doesn\u2019t match that bullet-point list you wrote years before, it\u2019s some kind of failure.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe only deliverable he sees as relevant here is to build a sustained community, which USLAF now has built in via the 75 artists it was given funds to and the 75 scholars, curators, and critics it has commissioned to write about their work.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI don\u2019t want to be an organization that gives you something one time and then doesn\u2019t help you anymore,\u201d Franco said. \u201cThe last five years have made this really beautiful community with direct ties to the organization, and now we can think about how to support within that community and to their own large communities.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThough the Latinx Artist Fellowship has ended, Franco said USLAF is thinking through new ways to continue to grow its 150-strong community via different funding models, which will be more modest in scale than the $3.75 million it was able to give directly to artists. \u201cWe\u2019re not closing the door,\u201d he added. \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/uslaf-organizational-future-josh-t-franco-director-1234780457\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/DSC_0910-copy.jpg?w=1024″] A decade ago, Latinx art within the US didn\u2019t have as much visibility as it has now. One of the key organizations advocating for this increased prominence in mainstream institutions is the U.S. Latinx Art Forum (USLAF), founded in 2015 by a group of scholars who wanted to ensure that Latinx artists […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1873942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1873942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1873942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1873942\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1873942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1873942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1873942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}